Starting Monday, New Delhi will become the epicentre of global discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) as India hosts the AI Impact Summit 2026, with the country looking to put forth its prowess in building real-world AI solutions, become the leading voice on AI in the Global South, and secure a seat at the high table of technological leadership.
Coming to the Global South for the first time, the summit, scheduled from February 16-20, will be officially inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 19.
At 5 pm Monday, Modi will inaugurate the co-located India AI Impact Expo 2026 at Bharat Mandapam. The Expo, the Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday, will serve as “a national demonstration of AI in action, where policy meets practice, innovation meets scale, and technology meets the everyday citizen”.
The summit represents the latest chapter in an evolving international conversation on AI governance and innovation. What began as the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in the UK in November 2023, where 28 countries signed the landmark Bletchley Declaration focusing on identifying AI safety risks, has progressively broadened its scope. The Seoul Summit in May 2024 expanded discussions to include innovation and inclusivity alongside safety, while the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025 emphasised practical implementation and economic opportunities, though issues of safety and security were largely sidestepped.
India’s pitch is somewhat different. Where previous summits wrestled with catastrophic risks and regulatory frameworks, New Delhi is centring the conversation on, what Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan calls, “People, Planet, and Progress” – to build AI solutions that focus on on-ground issues, an approach that reflects India’s position both as an aspiring AI power and a voice for the Global South.
The summit is expected to be watched closely across the world as it comes amid concerns that AI could fundamentally alter previously settled economic drivers, with world and corporate leaders discussing their plans for the technology.
Governments, industry leaders, researchers, civil society organisations, and international institutions are set to attend the event. It is expected to see participation from over 100 countries, including over 20 heads of government. The list includes French President Emmanuel Macron, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Spain’s President Pedro Sanchez Perez, Switzerland’s President Guy Parmelin, Netherlands’s Prime Minister Dick Schoof, and Estonia’s President Alar Karis, among others.
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Ministerial delegations from over 45 countries would be participating in the summit. A Chinese delegation is also attending after India sent a formal invite to Beijing.
More than 40 CEOs of leading global and Indian companies, such as Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Microsoft’s Brad Smith, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon. Modi will also host a dinner and address a CEO roundtable.
According to Abhishek Singh, CEO IndiaAI Mission, one of the summit’s key focus areas would be democratisation of AI, apart from showcasing real-world AI solutions in sectors like healthcare, agriculture and education that Indian engineers and talent are building locally.
“The AI that we are using presently is such that it’s developed in and by a few countries and the majority of the world are just AI users. If the datasets are not inclusive, bias will be there in the outputs. The issue with regard to democratising AI resources in the form of datasets of compute, models, algorithms and applications becomes a key theme for the summit,” Singh told The Indian Express.
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Seven thematic working groups, co-chaired by representatives from the Global North and Global South, will present concrete deliverables, including proposals for AI Commons, trusted AI tools, shared compute infrastructure, and sector-specific compendiums of AI use cases.
The summit comes at a time of great upheavals in the world. The proliferation of AI has led to existential questions about the future of work and the impact it will have on the jobs of today. India’s IT sector, a key driver of the country’s economic engine for the last two decades, faces one of its biggest challenges yet, as AI threatens to make many of their offerings obsolete. AI’s drain on resources like energy and water is also weighing heavy on many people’s minds.
The summit will host more than 500 sessions over the course of the next five days to try and address a roadmap through which some of these fundamental fears can be addressed. These sessions will address AI safety, governance, ethical use, data protection and India’s approach to sovereign AI, including the development of indigenous foundation models for strategic sectors.
The summit will also have deep dives into how AI is impacting professions and industries, the new skill requirements for the evolving job market, and the role of AI in supporting farmers, small businesses and individuals.
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India is also likely to see some companies launch domestically developed AI language models. Of the 12 applications to build large and small language models that India has approved, some of them are expected to see official launches. This includes sovereign AI models being built by Sarvam AI and Bharatgen. There could also be some hardware-related announcements, centres around expanding India’s data centre capacity.
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